


A Stoat Price to Pay

by Deejaymil



Series: Original Stories by a Bored Australian [8]
Category: Original Work
Genre: A mustelid menace, Flash Fiction, Gen, Mystery, Prompt Fill, War, it's a trap, original short story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 03:15:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13802217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: Someone in this story is going to die.





	A Stoat Price to Pay

**Author's Note:**

> Original flash fiction written for the prompt, 'Mystery, A steep hill in open country, Trap'

Someone in this story is going to die.

There’s a steep hill in an open country. Sparse and scrubby with no trees to speak of. Anyone walking upon it is outlined starkly against the sky, visible for miles forward and back. This is often a problem, as a war rages beyond the hill’s deceptively quiet backdrop. It appears, upon first glance, to be absolutely desolate. This is an incorrect presumption. Below the low cover of the brittle bushes covering the knoll in an olive-green carpet, the ground is sandy and loose. Hidden paths crisscross across the hill, years of use by those who’d prefer to remain concealed forming tunnels under the brush. Everyone who uses these peaks knows of the dangers of that stark outline.

Today, the deceptively quiet hill is busy. Upon one path leading to the convergence is a weasel, sniffing around at a forgotten beer can set down the hill just a little, right before someone wanting to remain hidden would drop to their belly and crawl onwards. The weasel is small and slight and, when considering humanity as a whole, completely unimportant. For today, however, this angry little mustelid is integral.

This weasel is going to kill someone.

The weasel, because it is a weasel and unable to conceptualise human notions such as death and war and tomorrow, knows nothing of this. All he knows is hunger. There’s food to be eaten and territory to defend and, here, he finds a curious thing. Made of wire and steel in a sturdy frame; his natural distrust of human things is overcome by a desire to _know_. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it’s also taken its fair share of weasels too. It’s a cage, yet another concept that weasels don’t really have a word for. They do understand ‘trapped’, however, and it is this that the weasel in his red coat and white bib finds himself when he gives in to his curiosity and skips inside, the door closing resolutely in on his tail. Angrily, the weasel dances, light glittering off the buckled can nearby only serving to infuriate him further.

And here come more of the cast. A line of soldiers in their ironed uniforms, fresh-faced and new to the world. There are twelve in a neat little row, like toy soldiers lined up by a child playing. They walk and joke and laugh because war is exciting and they don’t know any better, pausing only for a moment at the foot of that steep hill looking upwards. One of these men may die today, because of the weasel biting at the wire holding him, but they, because they’re young and naïve and hopelessly optimistic, know nothing of this.

Belly down they go, crawling under the brush towards the convergence of this tale. The trap with the angry weasel plopped so carelessly upon this hill, the can nearby just a symbol of how little they care for each other. The weasel thinks nothing of people and their games. The people think little of the weasel except what he can offer them in fur and flesh.

They meet. The weasel chitters and hisses and rages as the soldiers crawl by, one by one by one with barely a glance for the trapped mammal. His death is certain as their deaths are certain as all creatures’ deaths are certain—all as unaware as the other.

The final soldier pauses. His name is Steve and he’s far too young to be here, and far too good a liar for his own safety. At home he has a sister; this sister owns a toy. The toy is a weasel, scrappy and torn and once-coloured red. When Steve looks at this doomed weasel in his trap, he remembers this and feels something more. The weasel, looking at Steve, would very much like to bite him.

It’s unsurprising that Steve crawls forward, out of his line of toy soldiers, and releases the weasel from his trap. It’s unsurprising that the weasel, who is a weasel and doesn’t understand concepts such as ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘not biting the hand that saves you’, bites him for his trouble before war-dancing his way away, making sure that the blundering human is watching every last sinuous move, just so he knows who is _the_ warrior here.

Steve, because he is watching the weasel dance and smiling despite the bite on his finger, doesn’t see the can. He crawls on. He leaves.

He lives.

The weasel stops to groom himself, unaware that he was shown mercy by the man with the sister. Birds sing overhead. The sound of the soldiers crawling vanishes. The hill is quiet once more.

Another man approaches.

This man is the one that the weasel kills. Except, not on his own. The weasel alone is not responsible for the death of this unremarkable fur trapper. In a way, his death is a suicide. He placed the trap upon this hill despite knowing that soldiers cross it. In a way, his death is a statistic. Yet another civilian casualty in a war filled with too many. In a way, his death is ironic. His desire to bring death to another brings death to himself; he’d have lived if he’d chosen a career of farming cabbages.

In a way, his death is a murder.

Upon finding the cage empty, the man is angry. He rages, frustrated. Without furs, his family goes hungry. Times are hard when war rages on. He does his own dance of anger, standing up despite the danger of that sheer hill and the stark outline. He stomps and yells and spits. The weasel watches from the safety of the brush. He watches the man kick the cage. He watches the man notice him and yell. He doesn’t flinch because he, like every other weasel, feels no fear.

He doesn’t flinch when the man kicks the beer can towards him, just skips merrily out of the way.

The man dies loudly. Some stories end with a bang.

This is one of them.

And Steve, walking on dreamily to glory and honour and a likely death of his own, knows nothing about the weighted can resting atop the pressure-release M26 grenade set into the sandy ground of that steep hill.

 


End file.
